In recent years, management of hardware, software, data, and the like, which has conventionally been done by enterprise users and personal users by themselves, has been outsourced to outside companies to reduce management operation cost in some cases.
As a method for implementing such outsourcing, cloud computing has come into wide use. Cloud computing is a form of service that provides centralized management of hardware, software, data, and the like in an outside data center, or the like so that a user can use the hardware, software, data, and the like by using a Web browser or the like. Cloud computing includes, for example, SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
Companies that provide services by using cloud computing described above are introducing, as a method for managing data of different industries in a data center or the like, a federated configuration management database (FCMDB). The FCMDB is a technology that allows seamless federation of a plurality of systems by virtually integrating a plurality of databases (DBs) of different industries by using a CMDB proposed in the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL).
For instance, as illustrated in FIG. 28, an FCMDB is capable of virtually integrating and managing data (configuration items (CIs)) stored in a configuration-information management system (A-XML) and CIs stored in a service management system (B-XML). When information of a same type is stored in different DBs, the FCMDB establishes mappings between configuration items in the DBs to maintain synchronization and consistency of the configuration items.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2007-304796    Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 08-249338
Virtually integrating different databases as described above is disadvantageous in that establishing configuration-item-to-configuration-item mappings between to-be-integrated databases spends a considerably long period of time.
More specifically, with enhancement in performance of computers in recent years, an amount data stored in a database has become enormous and complicated in configuration in many cases. Configuration-item-to-configuration-item mappings have conventionally been established manually by a user even when such databases as described above are virtually integrated, and therefore have spent a considerably long period of time.